well I’m not really sure what the plan is at this point. So they leave Alden behind and promise to return for him after they. “You still need to decide,” he says, looking tired more than anything. They leave Alden on his lonesome after Negan tells Maggie she needs to make the call and she goes on some silly monologue about how he doesn’t get to decide who lives and dies anymore. Negan’s more a part of the group than you are at this point. She gives another speech about how he’s not one of them, never will be, blah blah blah. Maggie tries to save her and Negan is forced to carry her off-saving her a second time from certain death, not that Maggie is grateful. So it’s just Agatha left, and a few minutes later she gets bitten by a zombie. Why bother learning any of these peoples’ names when they’re just used as cheap deaths? Maggie has now lost almost all of the people she brought with her to Alexandria.Įlijah-Maggie’s own masked friend who apparently sports a similar style as the Reapers-was taken prisoner, it appears, though I’m not 100% certain about that. A woman named Agatha and the big guy, who is on death’s door. They help Alden out of the building and find two more of Maggie’s people. Still, things do get better once he’s around. He almost manages to save the episode as well, but not quite. Maggie’s almost a goner when Negan shows up to save her. Another Reaper superpower is being able to move with absolute silence and invisibility. Two Reapers appear quite literally out of nowhere and tackle Alden and Maggie to the ground.
He’s hurt and how he made it this far on his own remains a mystery. She finds Alden in a big, open room at the top of the building.
When she gets inside, the Reapers are apparently already there-I guess one of their superpowers is knowing exactly where the good guys will be. Maggie finds herself suddenly, inexplicably alone and wanders off I guess either to just get away or to find other survivors? She goes to an abandoned department store and almost gets a throwing knife to the back. Why does the one Reaper just nick Gabriel’s neck? It’s just a distractingly bad opening segment.įrom here, things pick up a little. What’s with the weird lighting on Maggie’s face during each close-up? Why is this shot filmed from such a distracting angle, with our heroes all sort of running here and there while the off-screen Reapers throw hatchets and knives at them? When the big guy is hit with those knives they look like they’re moving in slow-motion. The opening scene is a poorly choreographed disaster pretending to be an exciting action sequence. (At a certain point the names of all these groups gets so stupid and annoying-Wolves, Saviors, Whisperers, Reapers and yet our own heroes have no such moniker, why is that?) The real meat of the story (well, the figurative meat of the story, in any case) is entirely focused on the survivors of the Reaper attack. The Carol horse-whisperer stuff is the side-plot in tonight’s episode. The Walking Dead © 2021 AMC Film Holdings LLC. Was that not horse meat, then? Were they eating something else? It’s confusing. The better scene, by far, is Carol’s painful decision to kill one of the horses so that the people of Alexandria could eat, but even that was confusing since we see the kids eating bits of meat at the same exact time as Carol is out in the stables killing the poor creature. Why even have the sequence to begin with? Why not just have the horses wander into town? Carol’s little group of cowgirls wouldn’t have stood any reasonable chance of wrangling a dozen or so horses up on foot so easily, so they just don’t show it. Things can’t just happen and that’s especially true offscreen. We expect characters to act in ways that are plausible and sensible and to suffer consequences for making stupid or selfish decisions. Either that or they really don’t understand that even though this is a zombie show, we expect things to make sense. That’s been the arrogant attitude of The Walking Dead’s showrunners since Scott M. Angela Kang may as well say it out loud: “We think our audience is stupid, so we’re going to write these ludicrous, implausible scenarios and not even show our work and our stupid audience will just lap it up anyways.” Sure, we knew that two of the guards were bumping ugly on break and had to take off their armor in order to do the deed-but how did our heroes know where that was taking place, let alone reach the armor without detection-let alone get out of their cage to begin with? It’s not just an oversight, it’s lazy-and arrogant-writing. It reminds me of the first episode of the season when Ezekiel, Yumiko, Eugene and Princess manage to get out of their cage, steal two suits of Stormtrooper armor and almost make good their escape from the Commonwealth.